12:51
by but seriously
Summary: or: Bonnie, Caroline, and superheroes origin story in five parts. not set in an alternate universe.
1. part one

**ishi requested a "canon-compliant superhero non-AU for Caro where somewhere down the line she decides to ~use her powers for good~ and do the vigilante thing, mask and everything (no stupid impractical costume tho)", among other things.**

 **i tried my best. also, i have no clue what's going on in the originals, but from scraps i get an a very helpful explanation from my friend anne, i sort of got the gist of it, tried to work more of the plot into this, and then decided to just... not. much apologies, please be kind to my v. confused self should you decide to leave a review.**

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 **12:51**

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 **Part One**

 **In Which Everybody's Week Must Have Been Pretty Rough**

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—

The weekend after Klaus escaped from his wall, he sat down in his study with three bottles of liquor and double that amount of fresh blood, a steak cooked medium rare, and five years' worth of newspapers to catch up with the world.

Freya regarded him curiously. "You could have done away with the mess. We just ordered those new tablets."

Rebekah was much ruder about the piles he left. She was probably still mad she had had to miss four seasons of _Supernatural_ in order to save his skin.

Klaus didn't answer them. He continued skimming the pages with a prevailing interest, rubbing ink and paper between his fingers. He soon found that he hadn't missed much in his Marcel-imposed exile; that the mundanities of life had persevered through the years.

His thoughts started to wonder when he was three-years deep into his catching up. Nothing caught his eye, and he was starting to feel the gratitude of being able to sit in a comfortable armchair as opposed to being shackled to a floor dusted with rubble chip away.

Until he saw it.

He read the little opinion piece, then read it again, and a third time for good measure.

And then he called Damon Salvatore.

—

At that point, not even Damon knew of their little hijinks despite having moved himself into their apartment. He used the pretence of "keeping an eye on them" to make it past the front door. The living room became his _sanctum santorum_ , and the couch he took refuge in constantly smelled like booze and Doritos.

Caroline was not happy with this arrangement, and made sure to be very vocal about it every chance she got.

Sometimes it ranged from loud, to shrill, to wake-your-neighbours-up-at-3am-because-Damon-you- _fuck_ -you-left-your-underwear-in-my-laundry-basket piercing.

Tonight, Damon had the apartment to himself, and was glad for the peace and quiet. Caroline was out on a date, and Bonnie was at the library borrowing a book. She was always at the library borrowing books, and he liked telling people how bookish she was in a tone that was both patronizing and fond. It had taken some time, but he had finally perfected it.

In the middle of his _Grey's Anatomy_ rerun (" _Denny?_ You chose a dying sack of meat over Alex? _Really_ , Izzie?" he yelled at the tv), his phone rang.

It was Klaus. He hadn't heard from the fucker in more than a decade, and was immediately suspicious.

"City Morgue," he answered cautiously.

"Just to be clear, you're still second best," came the familiar gout of Klaus's voice. "I only called you because Stefan's number seems to not be working, mate."

"That's 'cause it's not," Damon said. "How do you still have mine?"

"If I wanted idle chit chat I would've resurrected Finn again."

Damon muted the tv and got to his feet. "And yet here you are, making idle chit chat."

"I merely called to enquire about Caroline and Bonnie's wellbeing."

"They're fine," Damon said shortly.

"You best make sure they're getting adequate rest for all the crime-fighting they're doing," Klaus said, and killed the line.

Damon spat out his bourbon.

That's how it all started, really.

—

Caroline was having a crummy night. The sole of her shoe had torn away as she was chasing her assailant across the rooftops of Midtown, and it now flapped with every step she took, and slowed her down considerably.

"I'm gonna get you, Raul!" she yelled, to make up for how she was losing him, fast. "Your album sucked!"

Raul the Eurovision Vampire came to a screeching halt. He was screeching quite literally, because of all the insults Caroline had hurled at him in the past week of stalking him, this one hurt the most.

"And your win last year?" Caroline continued as she hauled herself over a crumbling ledge. "Total pandering."

Raul hissed and bared his fangs. "You know nothing of talent, silly girl. If you did you wouldn't be spending your nights in cowardice, hiding your face with a gaudy mask. A poor man's Catwoman."

Caroline bristled, because it had taken her and Bonnie splurging on a sewing course in Uptown to get their stitching just right.

"And you would've gotten more than a deal sponsoring mattresses after you won Eurovision," she retorted, and Raul actually looked pained.

Actual, legit pain.

Caroline sighed. "Look, I'll cut you a deal. See this stake here? I won't stick it in your heart if you meet my conditions."

Raul warily eyed the stake she was twirling between her fingers. Normally he would have told her to kiss his ass, but he was cornered, and he didn't fancy becoming a splat on the sidewalk.

That, and he was afraid of heights.

"And the conditions are?" he asked finally.

Caroline took a moment to rip the failing sole completely off her shoe. It came off with one clean pull, and when she looked up Raul was still there, which meant there was still hope for a redemption arc for him.

She gave him a winsome smile. "Do you have a pen?"

—

Bonnie slid in through her bedroom window, heady with glory. She had gotten better at sneaking in and out at odd hours, but evidently not by much, since she managed to wake Damon up.

This was because he was in her bed when she threw herself on it.

"Damon, what the hell?"

Damon awoke with a snort. "A- _ha!_ Proof of your foolhardy life choices!"

Bonnie rolled her eyes and unhooked her cape. She made a mental note to pass Caroline twenty dollars. "Took you long enough to realize."

"I am living with _hoodwinks._ " Damon pouted. "How could you not have let me in on this secret?"

"Damon, you helped me with laundry last week. You literally folded pieces of my costume. It had my alter ego name on stitched across the front." She swung her feet and walked to the paper partition by her dresser, where she wiggled out of her outfit safe from Damon's prying eyes into a worn Whitmore sweater and blue shorts with lightning patterns on them.

"Are those anti-aging potions you're brewing finally screwin' with your head?" Damon was still on a roll. "You know how I had to find out? _Klaus!_ "

"Klaus is alive?" Bonnie asked.

"Yes, and even in his state of barely living he ousted you and Blonde Distraction's sly night crime-kicking."

Bonnie started to respond, but then got sidetracked. "Blonde Distraction?"

"Uh – yeah." He fiddled with his phone. "Blonde Distraction and Feisty Fire."

"That is fucking terrible," Bonnie said mildly. "And not even our names."

"That's what I call you in my blog, which I only update when I'm drunk. I've been following you for _years_. Check out the threads!" Damon waved his phone in her face.

"Are you drunk right now?" she asked.

"Yes," Damon said sulkily, "but only half-stupid. You were never at the library, were you?"

"Well, you were really sweet about it—"

"And you kept missing all those scrabble/pizza nights!" Damon howled into his hands, betrayal gutting him like a fish.

"Damon," Bonnie narrowed her eyes. "I'm tired. "The next time you spend the night in my bed, I'm burning your brains out."

"Reduced to being treated as one of your petty criminals," Damon sniffed. "So be it. Our friendship always had an expiry date, huh?"

Damon slinked out of her room. Bonnie considered calling after him, but figured she'd reason in the morning. For now, she had a huge bruise in her side to nurse, and sleep was calling.

—

It started with scaring off new vampires from innocent clubgoers, and then keeping the pasty creep-o's who lived in the apartment adjacent to theirs in line when bodies started piling up in their shared dumpster.

Caroline hadn't blown all her cash for an apartment in New York just for it to be crawling with the diseased, depravity and blood, so she took it upon herself to clean it up. An act of charity, if you will.

At night, she donned a mask and put on sensible boots. No stupid impractical spandex for her, nor did she for a minute entertain midriff-baring leather, no matter how hot she might have looked.

Sipping from her thermos of warmed AB, she kneeled by stone gargoyles and prowled through the night. Afterwards she would either jump from rooftop to rooftop, or practice her parkour, feeling invincible and (not gonna lie) really fucking cool.

At around 1am she got the read from Bonnie (in other words, Bonnie texted her in their coded-emoji) that their target for the night had arrived.

From five stories above she followed the sound of his footsteps through the alleyway, waiting to catch a heartbeat. When none came, she knew that he was the one. His steps faltered when he heard a noise behind him. Caroline took the opportunity to jump down on him.

"Hello," she smiled sweetly, when he was thrashing and spitting underneath her. She was sitting on his back, which couldn't be comfortable.

"Killing. Maiming. Money-laundering." Bonnie came slowly from the mouth of the alleyway, her cape flowing behind her. "That last one's kind of random, but the other shit we have on you—yikes."

Caroline gathered his hair in her gloved hands and yanked hard. The vampire cried out, enraged, but didn't look away from her piercing gaze.

"You've got a locker full of civilians waiting like lambs for slaughter," she said slowly, so he might not miss the threat in her voice. "Tell us where they are and you get to live."

"I'm gonna have to call your bluff," he rasped. "I've cut a pretty good deal, and ain't no stinkin' blonde and her twitchy sidekick are gonna stop me."

Bonnie's face darkened.

"Oooh," Caroline whistled. "Bad choice of words there, bud. She's not my sidekick. We're partners. I kick ass, she takes names. Sometimes I take names, and she kicks ass. Though 'kick' might not be the right verb here…"

"I prefer not having to touch you scum," Bonnie said, and from her fingers erupted flames.

Caroline smiled, eyes shining brightly in the fear that Bonnie had incited into the now-still vampire.

"What are vampires most afraid of?" Caroline whispered into his fear.

"Werewolf venom."

Caroline clicks her tongue. "No, the other thing."

The vampire, cold sweat on his forehead, hesitated. 'Uh—stakes?"

Caroline knuckled the base of his skull. " _Fire_ , you moron. She's waving it right in your face!"

It didn't help that he passed out immediately.

Bonnie sighed and dropped her hands. The alley dimmed once again. "Can we talk about this whole intimidation tactic thing?"

Caroline refused to look her in the eye.

—

It took about twenty minutes for him to come to, by which time Caroline had gotten bored of sitting on his back and had decided to chain him to the dumpster instead.

After they heckled and tortured the information out of him, Caroline pulled out the usual contract – stating that no further harm would come to him from their hands if he got the hell out of the city and signed along the dotted line – when he started monologueing and posturing in a way that was really, _really_ familiar.

Caroline pulled the pen away from his trembling grasp for it. She squinted in the dark alley, trying to make out his eyes.

"Caroline?" Bonnie asked, but Caroline barely heard.

The vampire was still monologueing, and Caroline felt a rising anger. She knew a compelled gaze anywhere.

" _Damn_ it, Bon."

Her fist swung out of her own accord, knocking the vampire out cold. There was a satisfying crack accompanying the slump of his neck, and Caroline dusted her hands off.

Bonnie eyed his body with distaste. "Harsh, Care. Don't you usually wait for them to sign the contract first?"

—

True to his word, Damon had indeed started a blog following the accounts of Blonde Distraction and Feisty Fire (not their actual names, but given the fact that he only ever blogged when he was drunk, he never bothered to learn their real names) and their vigilante crime-fighting on his blog, WatchOutVillainz dot com.

It was a smorgasbord of garish colour, Comic Sans, and badly-worded headings.

Klaus would never admit it, but he loved reading it.

He followed it with the same tenacity Caroline had for new episodes of The Bachelor, and one night even set up a username for himself to partake in the lengthy discussions over who Blonde Distraction and Feisty Fire might be.

His username was entirely anonymous, and he enjoyed having a persona to parade as he took down trolls and ventured the tags, verbally maiming anyone and everyone who dared speak ill of Blonde Distraction or Feisty Fire.

Granted, he didn't care much for the witch, but thought that Caroline would like it if he were to stand up for her too, so he did.

Damon showed up at his hotel room one night sullen-faced. "Get off my website."

"Make me," Klaus said, typing progressively faster on his keyboard.

Damon failed to make him, and returned home, turning all his loyal followers on one hybrid_master_127. Unfortunately, Klaus seemed to have accrued a cluster of minions of his own in his short time of perusing WatchOutVillainz dot com, and they threatened to hack into the mainframe of one of his life's most precious work.

Damon, having limited knowledge of IT, highly doubted the existence of a mainframe and whether or not it could be hacked.

In the end decided to play it safe, and Klaus stayed.

—

The way Caroline figured out it was Klaus who had been sending thug vamps her way was almost as fast as him discovering their true identities as the Vigilantes of the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.

A week after Damon had almost thrashed his hotel room, Klaus opens the door to his magnificently ransacked quarters. Caroline was sitting on what appeared to be the cracked granite of his bathtub, in his living room, with her legs crossed. She was still in her mask and boots.

"What is _wrong_ with you?" she yelled. "Why can't you pick up the phone and call like a normal person?"

"That would have ruined the fun," Klaus replied. "Besides, would you have answered?"

Caroline hesitated.

"I thought so."

"You never answered any of _my_ calls."

"I was chained up in a wall, love."

Caroline considered this. "Hm."

Klaus picked his way towards her, straightening lamps as he went. Minute goosefeathers floated about his shoulders; the pillows had all been speared onto the ceiling fan like kebabs. "It was all too easy to suss out it was you."

Caroline refused to bite. Instead, she stayed silent, watching him come closer and closer.

"You offered them redemption instead of gutting them alive, in document form to boot." Klaus sounded reproachful and he righted an upset table to hide his exasperation. "Furthermore, Bonnie made no secret of her pyromanic abilities. She was always very artful with that certain power of hers."

"You compelled yourself a massacre just to draw me out," she hissed. "I happen to take my craft _very seriously—_ "

"I know, love. I'm not laughing." And indeed he wasn't. In fact, he sort of admired the spirit in which she undertook her task. In all honesty, he believed this to be a phase—it took him a while to process the fact that she'd chosen to spend her eternity (or at least, a significant early part of it) doing _this_.

"So why are you here?" Caroline asked.

"Because." He paused. Why _was_ he here? Papa Tunde's torment had left him withered and raw; Hayley and Freya had gone to the ends of the earth to release him and when he'd woken up Hope was well in her teen years. Despite the world staying to same, too much of what he cared about had changed. He needed—he needed to make sure, needed to see for himself, how she was.

Perhaps she was right. A phone call would have worked better.

"I wanted to offer my services," is what he decided on at last.

Caroline snorted so loud he thought it was a piece of his ceiling falling on them.

—

"I know all the criminals in this city," he insisted, dogging her down the street. Caroline walked remarkably fast in the night. She had left her mask in the debris of his room, stating she had 'plenty more'.

"I'd rather go to vampire jail," she told him sedately.

"Ah, that rather poorly masked vampire rehab you set up," he said, falling into step with her. "The Elizabeth-Bill Institute for the Morally Bankrupt. I was just short of amused as to what an easy target you made yourself."

"And yet the only person who managed to figure it all out was you," she said.

"Well—Kol did, too. We were playing crime-bingo with your exploits." Klaus grinned. "I was one money-launder away from a win, so I decided to pull things to my favour."

"I'll wall you in myself," she seethed.

"Oh, where will you possibly find the time in between all this crime-fighting?"

Caroline whipped around, fangs bared. "Leave me _alone_ , Klaus."

"How are the twins?" he asked gently.

"None of your business."

"They should be around Hope's age, shouldn't they?"

"Stop talking about them."

Caroline took a detour through an alleyway, and with more agility than Klaus expected, climbed her way up the side of a building, all to get away from him.

Klaus weighed his options, then hefted himself up after her.

He found her sitting on a rooftop edge, the city pulsating beneath them. He sat down beside her and was surprised when she offered him a thermos of blood. It was still warm.

"Where were you keeping that?" he asked admiringly, studying her outfit.

She sent him a look that could kill, and went back to counting headlights. "Please don't tell anyone," she said quietly, after a while.

"I wouldn't dream of it," he said. He cleared his throat and glanced at her. "When did it start?"

Caroline shuts her eyes. "A few years ago. Josie and Lizzie were growing up pretty fast. Alaric—he, well. Didn't want me to have…" she gestured vaguely, "words were exchanged. I decided that if I could do my part to help in any other way, I'd do it."

"You'll soon be bored with the futility of it, I imagine."

"I've got an end goal in mind," she said absently.

After a fashion he realized she had stopped counting headlights and was focused on a window in the building across the cobweb of streets. Two girls, remarkably alike, were pulling the curtains closed for the night.

"They're nocturnal creatures," he said softly. "If I could venture a guess, just like their mother."

Caroline didn't answer. Instead, she rested her head on his shoulder. He stiffened in surprise, but she didn't comment on it, neither did she move away. "Next time, just call. You can't base my reactions on the girl you knew ten years ago."

"Some things will always remain singular," he said. He wasn't speaking about her. She hoped she saw it in the look he was giving her.

Caroline pulled away slowly. For a long time, she only looked at him. Klaus took a chance and reached for her hand, after which she tangled her fingers in his. They stayed that way for only a short moment, but the feeling of her palm, soft in his, lingered long after she'd slid her thermos back into its hiding place on her body and left.

—

Damon had taken to fixing them breakfast in the wee hours of the morning when they finally returned. He reasoned that it was the least he could do, what with all the slander he keeps slinging their way on his website.

"To blindside the scrutinizing eyes of the public!" he insisted, flipping pancakes.

However, when Caroline returned home with an extra guest, his spatula fell onto the island with a smack.

"I refuse to feed him," he told Bonnie. So offended was he that Caroline had brought Klaus home that he refused to speak to Caroline too. Looking right through them, he pointed out, "And I only made pancakes for _three_."

Damon gestured angrily at the table, where three immaculate plates piled high with pancakes and cream had been set.

Klaus scowled. "But there's four more, burning, by the way, on the skillet." He tried not to sound too indignant.

"You kidding me? These are all for Bonnie!"

As the two immortal beings squabbled, Caroline speared a triangle of pancake with her fork. Bonnie sipped her glass of orange juice. It felt strange for the apartment to be so full, especially with the presence of Damon's entire liquor cabinet dotting every corner.

Klaus finally wrestled himself a seat next to Caroline, but not before flicking off Damon's shirt that had been slung over the back of the chair with dispassion.

"That's it! I'm done! You can make breakfast _yourselves_ from now on!" Damon yanked off his apron and was gone with a huff.

"Does this happen a lot?" Klaus enquired, sniffing around a piece of bacon.

"More times than you can imagine," Bonnie said.

—

In the coming days, Klaus visited more often. His hotel room had been properly demolished, he took to reminding Caroline, who sighed and held out a towel for him to use her shower.

Bonnie delighted in the fact that she now has leverage against having a broody roommate/parasite, seeing as Caroline had one of her own now, too.

Damon continued to be miserable.

Klaus continued to goad them with his offer.

Caroline and Bonnie continued their crime-fighting.

"Let's not make this routine," Bonnie told Caroline as she garrotted a vampire who had been hell-bent on chowing down on a family of four. "By next week we kick them out."

"You got it, Bon," Caroline said, waving the contract in the choking vampire's face. "We're burning the couch. And can we _finally_ talk about that cape of yours?"

Bonnie rolled her eyes, but nodded her agreement as the vampire very reluctantly signed her name along the dotted line.

—

tbc


	2. part two

without all the screaming of headcanons that i do with anne, raoul the romanion eurovision vampire would never have been born. i love him, he is part of me now, i'm sure we'll see more of him soon. conversation between caroline and a certain original on linguistic devices were airlifted straight from our conversations, because anne is a genius that way.

also, ishi is a great source of inspiration for writing as well because half the things she yells at me ends up being straight up dialogue here. this fic is my shrine to them.

a little easy on the bamon this chapter - perhaps a bit too casual, but i'm saving all the good bits for the next chapter.

hope you read, and review too!

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—

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 **12:51**

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 **Part Two**

 **Call It Fate, Call It Karma**

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—

Removed from the mayhem and massacre of New Orleans, there wasn't much for Klaus to do in New York. He tried his hand in being protector of the night, but after Caroline realised he'd been tailing her for some time, she was quite angry with him.

She realised he'd been tailing her when she heard his admiring cheers after kicking a newly-turned vampire in the jaw.

"Couldn't have done it better myself, sweetheart!" Klaus applauded, pocketing his binoculars.

"How long have you been following me?" she demanded. She craned her neck to look up at him.

From his perch on the rooftop, he said, "A few hours."

Caroline stared at him, unimpressed.

"Four nights now," he admitted.

Caroline waited, still.

"Two weeks," he sighed, figuring it best to be truthful. He crossed his fingers behind his back.

Caroline, without a word, left.

He noticed she was more careful with the way she walked now because he hardly heard her at all. His apologies had been met with silence. He resolved to amend his mistake and reduced his stalking to just twice a week, until it became increasingly harder to track her down.

Klaus visited the apartment four times the following week and managed to miss Caroline every single time. Damon, elbow deep in a tub of Bonnie's Phish Food, was disgusted to find Klaus in his _sanctum sanctorum_ , poking a finger into the tall stack of books Bonnie had fake-borrowed from the library.

The books fell with a clatter, or would have, had Klaus not put his super speed to good use to pick them up before they hit the floor.

"Bored much?"

"I was locked up for nearly a decade. It doesn't take much to amuse me." Klaus had moved on to Caroline's collection of small cacti lining the windowsill. They used to be grouped in the middle of the kitchen island, but Damon had moved them there to prove a point. When Bonnie easily stepped over them to venture out into the night, Damon figured he might have underestimated the peril of the prickly plants.

"If you like it here so much, why don't you just move in?" Damon asked with a mouth full of ice-cream. He followed that mouthful with several hasty gulps of JD. " _That_ was rhetorical. Get the hell off my couch."

Klaus peered owlishly at him. "Are you worry-drinking?"

"No," Damon said, dumping the now-empty bottle for a new one.

Klaus went ahead on his prowl around the room, studying things, touching things. He had a particular way of observing an object, meaning: if it wasn't Caroline's, it was discarded into a pile in a corner of the room.

All of the things in that pile belonged to Damon.

"What are you doing?" Damon screeched, scandalized.

"Making room for me, of course," Klaus said.

"Of _course?_ " Damon pitched his bottle at Klaus's head, but forgot that Klaus was more than a thousand years old and knew how to duck. The bottle bounced – miraculously – against the mantelpiece and then landed squarely in the middle of the pile.

Klaus looked satisfied. "Good, that's the living room sorted. Now which one's your room?"

—

Word of Bonnie and Caroline's plight for the seemingly-impossible had taken Dumbo by storm. Sometimes, in the middle of Bonnie levitating a drunk werewolf by the ankles, a fan would come and ask for a picture.

"Where'd you learn how to do that?" Kieran from the grocery store asked in awe.

"YouTube," Bonnie answered. She turned her palms upwards and the werewolf crumpled against the alley wall.

" _Dude_ , does he have _fur—"_

"Hi, Kieran," Caroline appeared out of nowhere as she greeted him warmly. She made sure to deepen her voice. It sounded a bit like a growl now, and probably diminished the warmth. Kieran looked like he was going to piss his pants from excitement.

"How do you know my name?" he asked, mouth agape. "Should we exchange numbers now? I'm good at texting. Holy shit, your eyes – holy _fuck_ , are you a va—?"

"You short-change me every week. Also? If you're trying to clean up the environment, why even _offer_ plastic bags at the counter?" Caroline narrowed her eyes, wondering if that counted as criminal activity.

Bonnie inclined her head. It was only a small shake, but Caroline sighed and understood.

"Anyway. You saw nothing. You were probably on the way home to go marathon Homestuck and jerk off to how many people you scam daily with the price of your so-called free range eggs. I checked your supplier, buddy. All caged! Caged by _fiends_ —"

"Caroline," Bonnie said in her let's-get-a-move-on voice.

Caroline finished compelling him and sent him on his merry way. "How's Fluffy doing?"

"He'll live," Bonnie said. She inspected a nick in her arm that Fluffy had managed to scrape with his one sharp canine. His other had fallen off when Bonnie punched his face with a wall. "What's next on the list?"

After carefully pocketing Fluffy's freshly inked contract, Caroline pulled out her phone. Her shadowed eyes appeared darker in the light the screen provided in the alleyway. "Gotta check out that warehouse in Midtown. Klaus said it'll be hot tonight."

"Klaus," Bonnie repeated. Her tone implied she didn't like the idea, but she didn't despise it either, which Caroline chose to view with optimism. "Is this going to be a thing now?"

"No," Caroline said too quickly. She straightened her spine and managed to look dignified even as she said, "I just agreed, _very unenthusiastically might I add_ , that he could be our intel. Since he does know the seedy underbelly of this stinkhole city."

"He probably gave birth to the seedy underbelly of this stinkhole city," Bonnie muttered. "Anyway, that's like, what – forty minute walk? Forget it, I'll Uber there."

"Jeez, Bonnie." Caroline rolled her eyes. "Not like you haven't done this before. Hop on."

A breeze and thirty-five blocks later they arrive at their destination, Bonnie's cape whipping behind her as she lopes gracefully to her feet. Caroline grudgingly admired it, despite hating how impractical it was.

But then again, it made Bonnie look incredibly cool, especially when she did that thing where she lifted herself into the air.

"I see you hating," Bonnie notes, "and I raise you your mask and how it does almost nothing to hide your identity."

"I like them to be able to hear me talk," Caroline shot back. "When we start going after _actual_ creatures of the night instead of undead jock types, maybe I'll take more care—"

"Shh." Bonnie pressed a finger to her lips. She stood stock-still, chanting something under her breath. A minute later a light wind blew strands of her hair away from her forehead. "I sense at least twelve."

"Now there's a party," Caroline said and snapped out her extendable baton. She didn't need it, but appreciated the aesthetics.

—

Damon returned from grocery duties laden with things they did not usually buy. He knows this because he would edit the grocery list heavily whenever Caroline left it on the counter for Bonnie to find. Today, Bonnie followed him to the corner market because he refused to show her where he'd hidden the list.

"Why do we need kale?" He pulled a face.

"It's amazing how you still think you're included in this pronoun," Bonnie said. She walked right past the pork rinds and into the grains aisle, where she reached for the quinoa. "I spend my nights jumping up buildings. It's called maintenance, Damon."

"Qui- _NO_ -a," Damon tossed the pack back on the shelf. "Am I just going to starve, then?"

"There's Mike's Pizza right around the corner," Bonnie replied, unfazed. She grabbed the quinoa again. "Why don't you just go home?"

Uncharacteristic silence is all that comes from Damon's mouth, which opens and closes and opens again. His eye twitches, his mouth pulls into something other than his token smirk, for once. "It's getting… harder."

Bonnie bites her lip. She'd been avoiding the conversation, clearly. "I see."

"Seeing you is a nice reprieve," he offered.

"Got it." Bonnie sized up the contents of the trolley, then put the quinoa back on the shelf. Damon perks up. "Wanna get a pie to-go? It's been a while since scrabble night."

"Are- are you sure?"

"The crime can wait." She shrugged. "I just got a manicure anyway – not really feeling like punching much tonight."

"Don't you usually just—?" Damon waved his arms around, fingers jerking. "Levitate 'em? Make brain matter leak out of their ears?"

"You tell me," Bonnie snickered. "Aren't you supposed to be the _first ever foremost best quality expert_ on my alter ego life?"

Damon gasped. "So you _do_ read WatchOutVillainz dot com!"

—

Caroline's room was a hive of secrecy. The only person who was ever allowed in there was Bonnie, who usually came in through the adjoining bathroom. Whenever Bonnie did so, they let the shower run and talked in whispers, just because they knew it would grate at Damon.

There was something tugging at the corner of her mind as she swept down the street and climbed up her fire exit and into the window of her room.

The night before last, when she and Bonnie had ambushed those twelve vampires in the middle of their midnight snack, three of them had managed to skedaddle their way out of there. She had beat the others to an inch of their undead lives, Bonnie keeping them in place by simmering the blood in their necks, and only one name had come up.

Her bedroom did not really reflect her work ethic. When she decorated, she had placed comfort, coziness and warmth above efficiency, with quilted throw pillows and Moroccan rugs and a leather ottoman inherited from her late grandparents.

Her walk-in closet told a different story.

Pushing aside winter wear, she found what she'd been looking for: a safe. Inside the safe was a file cabinet, meticulously organized. It took a while to find the file, because she wasn't sure whether it had been filed under _R, E_ or _V_.

In the end, it was in the ' _MISC._ ' section. She pinched the file firmly between her fingers and out slid all her surveilled information on Raul the Eurovision Vampire.

She had caught him in a shady bar, after he'd eaten the entire room because he'd lost in the _Man! I Feel Like A Woman!: A Tribute to Shania Twain_ karaoke competition. He'd eaten them because in addition to not applauding him after he finished his rendition of _You're Still The One_ , they also didn't believe he was the same Raul who had won the annual international TV song competition back in 1959, simply because if he truly had, he'd be dead by now.

Mostly it was the applause thing.

Raul the Eurovision Vampire had on a long cape that trailed across the blood-smeared floor. He liked wearing high-heeled stiletto boots that gave the appearance of him hovering in mid-air, and brought them up in conversation any chance he got. He ditched those boots when he discovered Caroline was not above clawing up a drainpipe to chase after him.

She skimmed through his contract and found his number; a few seconds later she had her phone out.

Raul answered on the fourth ring. "I'm not home," he hissed, and hung up.

Caroline tried again.

"You are nothing but persistent!" Raul announced despairingly. "Is it not enough that you've banished me from the only home I've ever known; denied me the simple splendour of finally belonging?"

"Weren't you born in Romania or something?"

There was a sound akin to a hurricane as Raul breathed into the phone. "Those are fighting words, square and true! I will vomit on your possessions, insolent mushrump!"

"Uh – yeah. I need you to do something for me."

"A favour, she seeks!" He's still exclaiming. It's giving her a complex.

Caroline quickly explained the situation. "…and now I'm pretty sure you're my one way in."

" _You_ want _me_ to help you capture my _friends?_ "

"Just draw them out. And are you sure they were your friends?" Her lips twitched. "They gave you up so easy."

Raul scoffed, but that was all.

Caroline put her offer on the proverbial table. "I'll let you come back to New York every third weekend."

"What makes you think I'd ever return?" Raul sniffed. "That vile city was a coxcomb that never wanted me. Never was there a city that made me wish more for the eternal wiles of death."

Honestly, she thought the same about this phone call. With an eyeroll she said, "I'll give you back your boots."

There was a long, ugly pause. It was so long and so ugly that Caroline thought he had put down the phone.

At long last he announced, with vigour, "Seduction certainly becomes you, Lady Distraction."

"Actually, my name is—"

"Alas, I have a party to plan!"

"Wait, party?"

"Good bye!" Raul exclaimed. The line did not go dead immediately: there was the sound of a fumble and then the background chatter of Raul watching a tutorial on how to cook moussaka, before an incredulous Caroline ended the call for him.

—

As luck would have it, Caroline met Klaus at the party. Or rather: Klaus's hand was conveniently in the way when she was reaching for a cheese stick.

When she looked up, he was looking at her with astonishment.

"Can it, Mikaelson," she said immediately.

Klaus frowned. "But I haven't said anything."

"You're going tell me how ravishing I look. I'm going to ignore the comment and focus, instead, on why you're suddenly and _miraculously_ standing by the cheese platter of the first party I've been to in three years. Sure, it's actually a stage for my vamp round-up later, but—I mean, come on. You've got to cool it on the stalking."

"For one, I was going to tell you how _arresting_ you looked," Klaus corrected. He actually sounded offended. "And despite the evidence of the contrary, I'm not stalking you. I was invited."

He pulled out an invitation from his pocket, raising his eyebrows in challenge.

Caroline put her cheese stick back on the platter. " _You_ know Raul the Eurovision Vampire. Seriously."

"You mean Rah-OOL?" Elijah asked.

Caroline could have kicked herself for even being surprised. They probably spent the better half of a century perfecting the art of making an entrance.

"He's changed over the years, his vowels not so pronounced." Elijah had a slight kink between his eyebrows, as if it wasn't even worth frowning over, but he was anyway. "If you listen closely, you can tell he used to have an Indo-European accent; it's quite distinct. I detected clear derivations from the original Proto-Indo-European, but it's unmistakable. A _fool_ he has been making of the people in this room, but not us."

Klaus nodded quite seriously, sipping his gin.

"It is difficult to find likeminded company these days; people these days hardly have time to consider the nuances of language shifts and devolving case systems," Elijah was saying with a solemn shake of his head.

"That is so interesting." Caroline strained to smile and ended up baring her teeth instead. She turned back to Klaus. "How do you know Raul?"

("Rah-OOL," Elijah interjected.)

At that moment, Raoul got up on a makeshift stage in the center of the room and started belting out a welcome song he'd penned just two hours before the party (as he'd reminded each one of them as they walked in earlier).

He was back in his cape, boots, and white face paint. Everyone was understandably distracted.

"He's a mate of Kol's." Klaus said absently, and then returned his gaze to her. "Kol turned him some time around the 14th century. He used to sing for Marie Antoinette," Klaus added, like it was supposed to impress her.

Raoul placed a hand to his chest and screeched.

"Man, what a bummer I wasn't alive then," Caroline said dryly.

—

Klaus insisted on walking her home after she had 'created a scene' by making three grown-ass vampires cry in the middle of Raoul's fourteen-minute percussion solo.

Caroline's only response was to rustle their freshly-signed contracts against his jaw.

When they swung open the front door, Bonnie and Damon tumbled, both quite shirtless, from the couch to the floor.

Caroline backed away until her head hit the door. "I didn't know scrabble was euphemism for _sex!"_

Damon chose that moment to stand, all the better to deliver his comeback, but Caroline gave a shriek that rivalled Raoul's, and Klaus quickly ushered her out.

—

The sun set in a brilliant burn of orange and red. Caroline and Klaus were sitting on a bench, his coat around her shoulders.

"Why doesn't Damon have a room?" Klaus asked, once he'd placated her with ice-cream. Copious amounts of it.

Caroline shuddered at the memory of seeing his erect nipples. And then the shudder turned to rage, and she stabbed her spoon into her double chocolate. "Because he doesn't live with us."

"But he's there all the time."

"So are you," she pointed out.

Klaus has the grace to look abashed. "Only because my situation at home isn't… the most ideal." He gave her a sidelong glance. "But I am leaving tomorrow. It's time, I think."

Caroline looked up. She hadn't expected to hear that, not so soon. He'd been here for maybe a month, skulking around, loudly expressing admiration. He noticed her lack of enthusiasm for Damon's pancakes whenever she got back from a fight and nudged mugs of blood from questionable origins, but it was always hot and pulled flavours deep and rich from her tongue. Sometimes he'd intentionally give her the wrong addresses to vampire cult gatherings just so he could be there ten minutes earlier to "observe her progress". Once, after a werewolf had scraped her arm with his teeth, Klaus had readily shown her his wrist.

The look he'd given her that night had sent her to bed with uncertain, dark, thoughts—and a want, too, that made it difficult to sleep.

She stood up, took Klaus's untouched ice-cream and dumped it in the trash along with hers.

He didn't object then, nor did he object when she retook her seat next to him, turned her face upwards and closed the space between them with a kiss. Klaus made a sound of surprise, and deepened the kiss.

He didn't object when she tugged him off the bench onto their feet, nor did he object when she all but dragged him out of the park with great difficulty, because he still insisted on kissing her while she do it. They could have hailed a cab, but it turned out making out in alleyways could be great fun, especially when Klaus put his mouth to her neck and palmed her breasts through her thin cotton shirt.

"Do you mind if we make a detour?" Klaus asked hoarsely when she'd slammed _him_ to the crumbling alley wall and had looked deviously close to getting down on her knees.

"Detour?" she worried at his belt with playful fingers. "Where do you have in mind?"

"My place in the Upper East Side," he said with a half-grin, because his eyes are closed to the ministrations of her hand through the front of his jeans, which soon stopped when she spluttered.

"You have a _place_ —" she cursed and flashed to her feet, shoving his shoulders. "You _sly_ asshole."

"Honestly, love – if you can see yourself how you look in the comfort of your own home—" Klaus tried to beseech her, but she snorted and stalked off.

Klaus appeared in front of her and stopped her in her tracks. "You were slipping on your mask one night and I saw how fearless it made you look – how sharp and cunning and ready to strike fear into hearts. You _exuded_ this understated sensuality. I was in love with it."

Caroline looked at him curiously. "Was?"

"Am," Klaus amended.

"Good. I'll have sex with you with that in mind." She cleared her throat and stared ahead. "Take me there."

Klaus smiled. He smiled all through hailing a cab, and the smile only just faltered when she was standing in the foyer of his townhouse, looking around with her mouth agape.

"Wait until you see my bedroom," Klaus tried for a joke, but it died when Caroline started undressing.

Sleeping with Caroline was not like the green call of the forest all those years ago. It was like slipping into sleep, a tumble of instinct and touch, a lull that kept on lulling. He pushed into her with a groan. Her neck was wet with her blood; it had spilled from his mouth when she'd wrapped her thighs around him and squeezed. She cursed and damned him when he thrusted deeper, and then she kissed him with the same mouth.

Ten years shackled behind a wall had left him starving for touch, and she met his need with an urgency – but also with a practiced care, a tenderness she didn't realise she had kept in her breast all this while. Caroline could be soft when she wanted, and she wanted to be soft now, with him. When she came, she came with his name on her tongue in a long, keening sigh.

Before he left, Klaus woke her up. They shared a kiss in the shower—nothing more.

He was about to duck into his car when he paused, struggled with something internally, and then turned back to her. The kiss he left on her knuckles lingered, and he gave her a long look weighed down by layers of things she didn't know how to interpret just yet. She just looked back. Whatever he found in her eyes, he seemed content.

And then he said good bye, and was gone.

Caroline didn't know it yet, but it would be four years until she would see him again.

—

tbc

* * *

 **do let me know what you think!**


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